I focused on the third quarter go-ahead drive in my analysis diary, but while looking at progressions I also noticed that remarkable pass to Gentry on the play that O'Korn got targeted on. It was a blitz and a great throw to the open space where Gentry could get it.

But that wasn't even O'Korn's first read. He looked left first, read the coverage and the pressure, pivoted, and threw to Gentry just before getting murdered.

I don't think Speight would be in a tenable position if he started again, at least until a time where O'Korn would falter. Because as soon as Speight struggles (and surely he'll struggle again, especially against an out-for-blood MSU defense that has spent half of its practices since last spring practicing to play him) O'Korn will have to be put in, since we know he can get it done.

That's a shattering sort of thing to do to Speight. He would have to be perfect out of the box. Anything less than a TD (no matter if the right side lets blitzers into his face on every play or a runner slips and falls for a loss behind the LOS) will be blamed on him. And, worse, the confidence of the coaches and teammates won't be there.

You're kind of both right. MSU piled on a lot of garbage time yards, but 260 after three quarters isn't the end of the world and they were neck and neck with ND for yardage for much of the game. LJ Scott's fumble at the goal line would have made it 21-14 and a much different football game.

So yes, garbage time had an effect. But the game was more even on the field than the score indicated.

These predictions are always made too lightly. Unless a guy gets one particular injuring hit, he doesn't generally leave until the backup comes in because the game is out of hand. When we say "I don't think their QB will finish the game," what we really mean is that we think he's going to be really, really sore at the end of the day.

Our defense was considerably more powerful than Purdue's on Saturday, but our QB was the only one that was injured. Just how it goes.

I think that it's not necessary to involve B1G administration too directly. This is a voluntary association of schools, they can meet reasonable standards. And with the cash coming in, they can afford to.

Harbaugh isn't demanding a palace here. Just a reasonable amount of space, sanitary facilities, privacy, a decent training table, and temperatures that don't endanger the health of the players. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money.

I believe it is also quite spartan and small. The color is unimportant--it's not a player health/safety issue. That's acceptable gamesmanship, something he specifically drew a line on the other side of.

But I also recall hearing that it's pretty rough comfort-wise. Since Harbaugh isn't just talking about Purdue, but the entire conference, this seems like one of the logical places to check.

Still a lot of noise in these rankings. Hard to take seriously Air Force at #103--after they played us, they just played a really good San Diego State team and lost a much closer game. That's the SDSU team that hammered Stanford, FWIW.

These rankings must, surely, be using preseason data as part of the formula. There's no way Florida and Air Force are so far apart when Michigan is either a quarter or a third of their total season performance and our numbers were relatively similar (actually better against Florida!) on paper.

Ok, so there's been some talk on twitter about Harbaugh's remarks. Mostly the ones about locker room standards, also some tweets about game start times.

And, seriously, why do people overblow them so much? He's not complaining about the kick times for the game, he was asked a question about what time he preferred and he answered. This is not some big burn on the tv agreement or the AD.

Meanwhile, yes, there were issues with the Purdue locker room, and he spoke about conditions. But read what he said: He explicitly said that it's not just Purdue, and that it needs to start with Michigan, to have some basic standards about locker rooms in the conference. He's not just burning Purdue here, he's saying there should be something protecting the athletes in the 21st century.

And national media people are weighing in like it's a huge thing and bringing up the roster red herring. Ridiculous.

Notice also: Very carefully worded, very carefully delineated thoughts. Not just random spouting. And notice also that he's bringing this up after a win, not after a loss when it might seem like sour grapes. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if this thought occurred to him last year after Iowa, but if you bring this up after Iowa it will be interpreted as an excuse for a loss.

I want to see O'Korn start against MSU. The challenge now is that even if Speight clearly wins practice, there is no way that he doesn't have an ultra-short leash for weeks. All it would take is three bad offensive series and the players and coaches would believe that O'Korn would need a chance to come in. To say nothing of the fans.

That puts a lot of pressure on Wilton early if he steps back in. All it takes is a blocking whiff in the first possession and he's looking at 3rd and 12 from his own 18 with O'Korn ready to play the next series if he can't get it done.

But I don't think that will happen. Harbaugh doesn't just pull a rug out from a QB who has won the job, but he also doesn't feel obligated to keep that QB in if the backup gets a shot and shows he's got it. O'Korn has it.

I haven't seen O'Korn use his scrambling to really discomfit a defense consistently with his legs and arm at the same time. Perhaps it will come in time. I agree it would be a great tool.

We've seen Speight run occasional zone reads (or fake zone reads where the EMLOS is blocked) so we know that it can be useful. I doubt we'll see it more than two or three times a game, but even one pull and run should be good for chunk yardage and a first down.

I believe Speight knows the offense better, but what surprised me was that O'Korn was making multiple reads consistently and still making decisive throws. And that's the foundation that will move the offense and make all of this other stuff useful.

It's there to be fair. Imagine this: Michigan leads OSU by 4, time is running out, OSU is inside our 5, the clock is running. On third down, JT Barrett plunges into the line, stretches, and is ruthlessly pulled back by Devin Bush a yard shy of the goal line with 5 seconds to go. If called correctly, time runs out before OSU can run another play and Michigan wins.

A ref on the near side rules it a TD. The clock stops. It goes to review.

OSU realizes that the play will be overturned and is already lined up when the call is announced. The ref spots the ball, clock runs on ready for play, OSU snaps the ball before it runs out and scores a TD.

Is that just? Absolutely not.

The runoff exists to prevent this scenario.

For the Lions, the injustice is the overturned call. Not the runoff. The runoff is just bizarre. If Tate were a hard and a half short there is no more time to run a play and no controversy.

This is where we as fans have to remember that the coaches and players know more about the calls than we do. It's pretty common for a QB to make a good pass when there's another guy screamingly wide open on the other side of the field. That doesn't mean that the QB chose wrong. The plays are designed with certain reads made pre-snap and certain ones made post-snap. If the QB reads that a guy is open, he makes the throw. He doesn't wait to see if another guy is even more open. That's how the read is correctly made.

So if O'Korn saw both defenders and read that his receiver was open, he made the right read, scary as it was to see.

This is partly why that Speight miss last week where Perry was wide open in the flat was so bizarre, inspiring so much debate. Because Speight began by looking left, and the read appears to be blitheringly obvious to go to Perry. It's not even complicated. Thus, the debate to explain the inexplicable.

Players improve, things change. We had stopped David Boston every time we had played him, until 1998. OSU had stopped John Navarre every time they had played him, until 2003.

I expect Barkley to have a productive day against Michigan, because he's a great player. As great as this weekend? I sure hope not, and I think Michigan can limit the damage. But he's going to make plays and get yards. And, to be honest, with the aggressive style Michigan plays, he's probably going to be left one-on-one with someone like McCray and totally burn them for a huge play at least once.

But that doesn't mean that the defense can't otherwise lock down PSU. What will the offense do? That remains to be seen.

If only there were an example of a Michigan team with a great defense and a suspect offense travelling to Happy Valley as an underdog in a huge game with serious national implications.

I think the playbook, at least initially, was actually smaller. Speight knows the playbook and he knows the reads. With a couple of galling misses last week aside, he has made the right ones. But he has often been a hair late, and his confidence has removed a number of the options from his arsenal as he seems to no longer trust himself to make them without endangering the team.

O'Korn was willing to take the shots that were needed. A rifle into a zone, a long pass to DPJ down the sideline, (on his fingertips! but he needed to high point the ball. Still a great throw) a rollout pass to Grant Perry over the arms of a defender, etc. In that sense, he had a lot more available to him than Speight.

But a lot of the plays were mesh routes and simple outs to the flat. Nothing complicated, but hit the receivers in stride and they can turn up field and do stuff with it, and that's what happened.

It's funny, though--he came back into the game and he was fine. He made the reads, he hit key passes.

But then against Cincy and Air Force (and three pass plays against Purdue) he has been gunshy. The endzone fades being the classic example, plays that have almost no chance of working, whose sole merit is that they won't become interceptions.

My guess (and this is just a guess, only fools think they have any actual knowledge of the thought processes and development of players) is that he shook off the picks fine during the game. But then he spent the following days marinating in the fact that the only thing that made the Florida game at all competitive were interceptions that he threw.

And since then the key priority for Speight has been, "don't screw up."

So he stops going over the middle. He bails on perfectly open reads (that notorious read where Perry was wide open and he inexplicably diverted to the right where DPJ was double-covered). He tosses fades that nobody can catch on the slightest provocation. Hard throws, which he has made before, drop from his arsenal.

O'Korn was making those throws today. I can't say that the team doesn't score a few TDs with Speight--maybe the playcalls work to his strength and things work out. But throws like the one O'Korn zipped into the zone and a couple of his plays rolling out are throws that Speight would make at his good moments last year and has shown no signs of making this season.

Michigan division: The offense overcoming real (and persistent, and not necessarily fixed) struggles to put the boot to Purdue's throat in the second half. Great throws. Big holes. TDs in the red zone. With the bye week here, it's just what we needed to feel good about the team.

Non-Michigan division: Got to watch football for the better part of the day for the first time. The PSU-Iowa game was fantastic. Saquon Barkley is really, really good.

On the one hand, there have been a ton of plays where I've looked for Gary and seen him eating (or beating!) double teams and being a split-second later than the other swarming D guys. He's making stuff happen.

On the other, he often plays a similar position to a guy like NFL in-his-prime JJ Watt, a guy I think Gary could be a lot like. And in his prime, Watt was by far the most dangerous person on his defense and he still got counting stats and destroyed everything.

So I'm a bit concerned because I want to say Gary show up the way Winovich has. It hasn't happened yet. He's been good, but he hasn't been great.

Of course Devin Bush might be the best MLB in the country right now. That's a totally uneducated opinion, but he has quickly achieved greatness.

The context has a great deal to do with the quality in my thinking. It's hard to do much with a blitzer literally flying into your face, but he combined a good read with a pass to a spot that gave his man a chance and forsook any chance of a turnover. At worst it's an incomplete pass. Sharp play in my view.

I'll politely disagree here. I felt it was a good read of single coverage in space, and a throw that put the ball in a place his receiver could reach but the defender couldn't. Under extreme duress. Great throw IMO.

Nothing like a good close to a road game on offense to make the fanbase feel good.

I feel that the playbook was simplified for O'Korn, especially early, giving him easy crossing reads to get moving. But he hit them. And then he began hitting some clutch passes, including the dart through zone coverage and that terrific pass on the play he got targeted on.

It remains to be seen if he has exploitable weaknesses, but the early returns are good. I wonder if simplifying things isn't just a good idea anyway. Speight seemed to play with so much on his mind, causing mechanical breakdowns and mystifying reads after previously doing both flawlessly.

Receiver injuries are a worry. Nico and Oliver will be needed.

Not a worry? The defense, man. Bush is smart and fast and electric, just like another guy that was just on this roster last year. The corners blanketed Purdue all day. It feels like they're getting better every game.

Our defense is soooo good. They emptied the RPS war chest in one drive to get a TD. Michigan adjusted and it was over.

And he might have a point about being too confident. Feels like they were too wound up--excitement is good, but those penalties were legit and might have come from having too much emotion invested in the game.

I feel like the play calling for O'Korn's early drives was simplified, with a lot of crossing stuff that he was able to hit. Then, as O'Korn settled in, some other stuff was brought in.

I wonder if the coaches' desire to have a comprehensive game plan (that only Speight is capable of really handling) had become too much. Speight has the capability of executing stuff but maybe the complexity has overwhelmed him this year, combining with his constantly working technique and poor protection.

Simpler worked.

Granted, O'Korn also had to load up and execute some key, challenging throws.

There's very little our country can enjoy together anymore. Sports had been, tenuously, one of those things. I have significantly different views on many things than a lot of people, but our shared fandom gives us a common space to interact, to recognize what we have in common, to share in something as humans.

I absolutely hate it when sports is co-opted for politics. I've had to stop reading a number of enjoyable written features because their authors cannot stop using them to discuss politics. I've unfollowed guys on twitter for the same reason. And I hate it when the staff of this here blog, people I enjoy reading and would like to consider friends on some level, descend into politics.

And I absolutely hate that the president is co-opting sports for politics. And I would have felt the same way if the previous president had done the same.

Even NFL teams are reluctant to try field goals of 60+ (records are typically set at the ends of halves) due to the field position and return risks. If Nordin is a steady threat from when the team hits the opponent 40, and he already is, that's about all you need.

I hate to be a curmudgeon but I don't want to see them try something like this unless we already have like a three-touchdown lead. A kick of that distance requires a lower (more blockable) angle and also allows the opponent to station a returner in the endzone, something history has shown us is no small threat. An athlete with acres of open space setting up a return with a bunch of big uglies trying to bring him down? That's a dangerous proposition.

The worry isn't that our D will get plowed under all game. The worry is that the offense will struggle so much that it will only take one or two breakdowns by the defense to lose the game. All defenses break down from time to time, and the possibility is increased with a team so young facing an offense so creative.

If Michigan bogs down in the red zone again, all Purdue needs is a coverage bust and an own-zone turnover and this could be an ordeal for the entire second half.

I confess part of me keeps wanting to see Gary really break out and dominate. It's disappointing when he doesn't. Having a #1 overall recruit on the roster is no small thing, and to some extent the staff can be evaluated on how they've prepared him. The next #1 overall guy is going to want to know.

But he doesn't look lost or incapable out there, and the rest of the front 7 is absolutely astounding, so perhaps his contributions are less visible. It does seem that he's eating a lot of double teams, which will limit his statistical effectiveness while allowing guys like Winovich and Bush to shine.

Zordich wasn't telling us to push the panic button. We interpreted his remarks to mean that there was a problem, since he was waiting for the guys to put it together.

But he might have been sending a message (his recent quotes suggest that may be the case) or he might have simply been dealing with a different standard than we were, since both Watson and Long have looked good.

Theory on the conundrum of Michigan doing such a good job limiting Air Force's offense when the RPS number is so neutral: I'm just throwing stuff at a wall here, but is it possible that the triple option as it now exists primarily or at least partly functions by getting a healthy proportion of RPS+ plays? When run correctly, the option is going to leave a defender unblocked who will always be wrong. DCs adjust by bringing another defender open, leaving RPS+ options available on counters and also passes.

It's just a theory, but RPS neutral might be death to a military academy option team, since they aren't going to field equivalent athletes to top-end competition. Brown's achievement may be just eliminating their usual advantage.

Yeah, this is a bad argument applied to college. Texas isn't patient with losing at all because the source of so much of that revenue can get discouraged by the play on the field and decline to buy tickets, making donations, etc. Michigan was facing a revenue cliff under Hoke and DB with plunging ticket sales and lost confidence. There was no plausible dollar amount for Harbaugh that was too high.

Let's not kid ourselves, there's a lot of pressure in the NFL too, but franchises feel it differently, since the majority of the revenue is evenly distributed. The owner of the Lions doesn't have to depend upon the fan enthusiasm of the Lions to continue making money, because he's getting revenue from the fan enthusiasm of people in Denver and Dallas and New England.

The dynamic is a little bit different between coordinators and head coaches, right? It sounds like Wilson's Indiana regime was a bunch of hardknuckles digging on kids. But if he's a coordinator, the paradigm is different.

Perhaps, for example, he follows Urban's lead in how to deal with kids. Alternatively, he continues to be hard on them, but it has a different feel because they have good-cop position coaches and a guy in Urban who can offer the encouragement that offsets the toughness from the OC. Or, perhaps, the OC simply doesn't have that much direct contact with the players.

Dave Brandon may not be at fault for the long-running trends of retail that have engulfed Toys R Us, but in hiring Brandon they found a man incapable of introducing any kind of renovation that could actually save the company. DB is an Automated Business Cliche Generator, not a leader.

I have some experience with snow in California myself, having been stuck in the San Fernando Valley after work because a couple inches of snow closed every road over the San Gabriel Mountains.

But I will be fair: Early in my time in CA I would quietly mock Californians for the chain restrictions they would establish at higher elevations in snowy conditions. "These fools don't know how to drive in snow," I thought.

Then, on a road trip my wife and I took specifically because we wanted to see some snow in the winter, we travelled into the lower ranges of the Sierra Nevada north of Lake Isabella. We were below the "chains required" line but still in snow on the mountain roads. It was stunningly gorgeous, by the way.

We got to the "chains required" cutoff and dutifully turned around.

And driving downhill, with some snow falling and accumulating, on those winding mountain roads where you could look over the side and see 500 feet straight down, I discovered (safely) why chains were such a good idea. Winding downhill roads aren't at all the same as a wide stretch of I-94, and the penalty for a mistake is a lot more severe than getting stuck in a ditch.

The only thing more exciting than sliding backwards in snow in a 40-foot school bus down a narrow road with cars parked on either side is slamming the bus into reverse and hitting the gas to reacquire steerage and navigate your way out without hitting anything.

Then again, I've seen them look like the Giants in the first two weeks before, too. A lot. I'll take this big time. The upside to being more invested in your college team is that you can just enjoy this without having to pick apart the flaws.

Rarely have I seen something like this that is so appropriate, meaningful, and cool.

There are a lot of contrived "heartwarming" moments that are nice but are overdone or go to absurd lengths to set up. And they're fine. But they don't always represent "real life."

But this is a tradition using sad circumstances that already exist. The hospital is there, the kids have a view. Kids are always going to be there, with their families, dealing with heartbreaking health issues. The waves they get are always going to be meaningful. It's always going to be a bright, good memory and experience for those involved.

Let's first of all say that there's a lot we don't know: We don't know the playcall, we don't know what Speight thought he saw or what specifically he could see at the time, and we don't know for sure what the primary read is (I wonder if he was supposed to read the safety or something).

We do know that Perry was open and that Speight missed him, so on a macro scale we can say that Speight missed this.

I have a "yips" hypothesis developing as this thread progresses. A hypothesis that suggests that Speight has been affected by the mistakes that he has made in otherwise well-played games. Michigan beats OSU if the OL can gain even a first down or two in the fourth, but it also beats OSU if Speight doesn't throw the backbreaking INTs that kept OSU in the game in the first place. And Florida's only chance to compete came from Speight.

And as a result, perhaps he is becoming more focused on not screwing up, rather than just making the plays he knows.

So he sees that safety flashing in, hasn't processed the blitzer, and in a split second bails from the read on the left side worried that there's a defender he hasn't seen that is going to step in front of the pass and house it.

It's hard to make a firm call without all-22 footage showing us everything that Speight sees.

But I don't get this. I'm not a football guy, so all information I have is from reading, but I know enough to know that a QB's first read is usually the same side of the field. This is partly why people think a QB has locked on, because he doesn't turn his head while he's reading a defender.

But if he's looking left, theoretically the read is Crawford vs Perry, and Perry should be the automatic release.

But Speight looks left, reads something, and cuts across the field. My guess is that he saw the safety breaking to the strong side of the field and thought that there would be defenders both receivers, and thus that DPJ would have an open look. But there was a blitzer coming from the strong side, and the safety was moving over to occupy the blitzer's vacated coverage.

Because it seems like Speight is making decisions based upon his desire not to screw up. The (typically inaccurate) fade passes out the back of the endzone are symptomatic. Rather than make a read and a decisive throw, he is making a throw that will either be caught by his receiver or nobody.

I wonder if the two INTs against Florida have him spooked. That's a game that Michigan dominated from start to finish, yet were trailing (a missed FG away from being down 10 points) because of passing game mistakes. Against inferior teams with a great defense, he knows (as we all do) that only a major mistake could prevent Michigan from winning.

And he's kinda right. But perhaps it's gone to his head and he is less willing to make the tough but smart throw than he was last year.

I would have been less concerned about this at the beginning of the season, but the passing game is a problem right now and Black was probably its best feature. Speight is having chemistry issues with the receivers as it is, removing his best target is not good.

DPJ needs to start coming through on the hype now. Might be time for the O coaches to install some simpler stuff for the receivers.

This is increasinglyh turning into an odd conference priority tracker. Non-conference games basically capture territory for conferences, and then the conference seasons shake things out. Only a team like a hypothetically good Notre Dame can really shake things up.

Michigan has colonized central Florida and southern Colorado for the B1G, while Wisconsin and Iowa have given us big gains in the west. Sadly, Nebraska has been lost to the Pac 12.

Most of these territories will now change hands, but within the conference.

Good stuff. I followed the trail upstream to greentechitm.com, the manufacturer site. It's mostly fluff but does have a good description of the turf system and some promotion of their projects.

It seems like the main advantage is modularity. Since the field is basically floating with no base soil interaction I suspect that it would work if a proper base and drainage system is installed at Michigan Stadium. However, you are paying a lot of money for its modular nature. I suspect this is considerably more expensive than fieldturf for little non-cosmetic gain.

Now, if we were interested in naming a grass field after, say, Stephen Ross, it might work.

It seems like people are arguing past each other here. A couple things:

Michigan installed prescription athletic turf (same stuff used at Purdue, Iowa, and OSU among others at the time) in 1991, but in the mid 90s hired a new field management guy who followed the Penn State model and abandoned the PAT system and tried to manage a conventional grass field. My recollection is that this change is when things got really bad, but given that PAT has been abandoned elsewhere I assume it had issues that I simply don't recall.

There are now new grass systems that may properly deal with the water table problem.

Those systems are fantastically resource intensive (especially the Green Bay system Rufus describes, a system that still might not fix water table issues) and are probably not enough of an improvement in quality to be worthwhile.

I would've been with you at the beginning of the year but he's the one receiver that seems to be putting it together at s time when the passing game is struggling. Removing Speight's best target seems like a big negative right now.

DPJ is Michigan's highlight. Also a highlight: Seeing a hot take from the offense UFR comments so thoroughly refuted:

Early observation on DPJ: he does not have the explosivity of even a Peppers on punt returns. We are missing that explosive punt returner that Bo always seemed to have around. In fact, I would say DPJ seems a tad less explosive than a Mario Manningham. He can still be an outstanding player at Michigan, but I don't see a gamebreaker when I see him play. Hope my first impressions are wrong.

That's a reasonable counter-argument. I still basically disagree, though; the offense didn't score a TD until we were running out the clock at the end of the third quarter, and far too many possessions ended in punts. This isn't Wisconsin, it's an Air Force team with athletes that wouldn't be playing for Air Force is Power 5 teams wanted them. Yeah, complicated schemes, etc. Michigan should be able to roll these guys on talent alone.

And simply wasn't doing it.

Things could well improve over the course of the season. Perhaps the coaches are coaching with that in mind (though that's just a hope, I don't know of examples of coaches actually focusing on future development at the expense of game week prep). Perhaps incremental improvements in multiple areas will result in large gains in consistency and explosiveness (lots of examples of this to rely on).

But there's no way that scoring 22 points on Air Force in 2017 is anything other than problematic.

I thought he was a dead man walking when they got housed by Alabama, but they pulled things together nicely and certainly look like they have things together that they didn't under Sark and Kiffin.

And the guy is likeable. Both he and Darnold were nothing but classy toward Texas after the game tonight.

But the consensus thinks they're good because they beat Washington and Penn State last year. Given that Stanford doesn't look great and Texas has already been humiliated by Maryland. So we still have no idea how good they are.

Speight is not as sharp as he was in easier games last year. My hope is that this can be straightened out, he can become more consistent, and start converting these red zone opportunities.

However, the team gained fewer than 400 yards, which is the standard in college these days and definitely the standard for Michigan. There are a lot of moving pieces that aren't meshing that well right now.

And while I think people are silly to heavily criticize the coaches, the offense doesn't seem to be installing the same level of new things every week that was the signature in the last two years. I'd like to think that this is some combination of holding good stuff in reserve for tough opponents and repping the basics more frequently so that the young guys can gain command of the offense, but I'm just some guy at a computer making wild guesses.

One thing I think can be said is that for whatever reason Speight has been unwilling to make the same number of decisive, pivotal throws he was last year. He's not roping a pass into the endzone to a narrowly open receiver; he's looking for a guy that's wide open (isn't happening, maybe because they're young) or he's throwing a fade that will either be a fingertip catch or (actually, it's been always) too far for anyone to catch. It's cautious.

It's not totally unreasonable, given the quality of the defense, but it is certainly frustrating and there's no way the coaches are telling him to get paranoid inside the ten.

You're complaining about your "points being taken away" and suggesting it's because you've predicted 8-4.

But that's not why you're getting negged. You're getting negged because you're asserting as fact things that you do not have knowledge of or are flatly incorrect about.

Speight doesn't inspire his team mates, has no touch, can't read defenses or change up the play, and telegraphs the ball like no one in college ball today.

This is just plain wrong. You have no idea what goes on in the locker room (though teammates firing back at critics might be a clue you could follow) so your remark about his inspiration of teammates has zero merit. He is clearly good at reading defenses, and basically always makes the right read. And there are already a couple of pretty memorable examples of him making great changes and/or adjustments while under center, so your assertion about "changing up the play" is just plain false. And he has also demonstrably shown an ability to go to his second and third reads, so your "telegraphing" remark is also false.

His execution of the reads and the plays is of course a major issue. But you're making assertions that contravene the facts on the field, undermining your argument entirely.

Overall, this is a team without leadership, grit, and enthusiasm. Watching the players walk off of the field they looked like a bunch of guys walking off the job site at quitting time.

This is typical "feelingsball" talk-show radio material that has no real rational basis. You have no knowledge with which to make these allegations; you are just drawing conclusions based upon your "feelings" because the team hasn't performed up to your standards. You're acting like there is something "telling" about how you saw the players walk off the field. Frankly, there are few things that could matter less in analyzing the game.

Look, I think there are issues here too. The team needs to score TDs. And your post elsewhere citing last year's blowouts was on the whole useful, I think. Air Force and Cincy are teams we should be beating by 35. But you're shunning thoughtful analysis for stuff that has no bearing on the game, and complaining when people don't agree. It's unfortunate.

While there are reasons to be optimistic, if the last three games are any indicator of this team's capabilities then it's going to be a long and tough season for Wolverine fans. Without sudden improvements I don't see how they reach 8-4. Season 3 of Harbaugh and I'm less assured of this squad than I was either of the last two years.

Pretty easy to see how they reach 8-4: They win four of their last nine games. Might seem like a stretch to you but I think they can patch that together.

I think Speight has "I can't throw any more INTs anxiety," and doesn't fully trust his young receivers.

I totally agree. I think this is part of the red zone issue--without deep space everything is compressed, and every throw is into traffic. Speight has made these throws before, but in the games Michigan early the only way Michigan is threatened with a loss is with a bad INT. So he goes cautious. Throwing it away. Throwing a lot of those fades that aren't terribly accurate but are designed in such a way that if his receiver doesn't get it, nobody has a chance at all.

Combine that with receivers that aren't yet as crisp as last year's experienced crew, and their inexperience in getting open when Speight is scrambling, and you have some tough windows.

I'm inclined to agree that this is a troll account. The evidence is pretty clear:

1. Nobody who is a real Michigan fan could possibly consider the two losses he listed as the worst of the last 20 years by any standard.

2. Nobody who actually pays attention to, well, anything in the last three years can think that JH has a problem with vanilla playcalling or predictability, or really coaching at all.

Real fans might complain about an issue with the coaches here or there, but only trolls (and, I suppose, a hypothetical category of fan with the intelligence of igneous rock) could actually hold these two positions.

I have to come down now and say that my hype regarding the receivers was premature. Don't get me wrong, Black and DPJ have both been very good and neither can possibly be described as "disappointing" by any standard.

But I was hoping that they'd come in with Crawford and seamlessly replace the production we lost from Darboh, Chesson (who I've been hard on) and Butt. And it hasn't happened.

In part this is because it takes time to learn the nuances of the routes and the playbook. DPJ has, by most accounts, started from a deficit in that he didn't learn a lot of routes in high school. His relatively small presence in the downfield passing game suggests that he's still working his way up to speed here.

It's also in part because these guys just don't have experience in a lot of the small areas that help receivers succeed beyond athleticism. Remember when Speight rolled out to the left and tried to flip the ball to Crawford near the goalline? After the pass was batted down, Speight was motioning that Crawford should double back deep, gain some separation from the defender, make the defender choose either to cover Crawford or attack Speight.

Crawford's a true sophomore. Speight's scramble passing stats have been paltry so far this year, and I think a lot of that is because the receivers don't yet know how to find places to get open. Speight was really good throwing on the run last year, and if that asset is limited by inexperience, that's a significant negative.

The good news is that it's early. These guys have a lot of learning to do and a lot of time to do it.

Maybe because the receivers don't have it all down. We're relying on a true sophomore and a couple of true freshmen, and the role involves a lot more than just drawing up a route on the palm of your hand in the huddle.

These are things that I think are impossible to track. For one, Brian has doubtless refined his grading over time, so a play that may have netted a -1 in 2009 may not in 2017, and so on for other scores. For two, I think the loss of data that comes with using older, lower-def, zoomed-in camera angles on not-so-good videotapes is acceptable to get the gist of the games, but a lot of detail is lost and thus the UFRs can't really be considered to have equal standing.

And too much stuff is just plain skipped. There's no way that anyone can properly, say, UFR the entire 1997 season, and even if they did they leave out stuff from 1996 and 1998 that could further illuminate the performances of those players.

The formula isn't difficult (if it were there's no way he'd release it) and one could do a close approximation just by reading his UFRs closely. The problem is: 1. It's a lot of work; 2. Attempting to produce one is essentially stepping on Brian's signature product and his intellectual property and he won't be cool with it (note Seth's response above). And I'm fine with him feeling that way.

All understandable issues. Having stuff off-camera is frustrating but in the case of these classic games it seems like it's a bit easier to hand-wave missing footage since we don't really NEED to know what these guys will do in the future.

Anyone who has worked hard to produce something creative understands Brian's ownership over the UFRs and should have no objection to that, so in that case this seems like something that could provide good offseason content.

Agree, this is a bad example. Pitt is a P5 team that is occasionally good (you have no idea how good a team will be when these schedules are set years in advance) that managed to beat the national champion on the road last season. That's not a bad schedule by any stretch whatsoever.

In seriousness, this stuff is cyclical. It might be long cycles, but it's cyclical, and there's no way to do things in a way that either aren't subject to those cycles or otherwise unjust.

Face it, Michigan and Ohio State are likely to be the giants of the conference for the forseeable future. Either you have them weighing down one division, or you split them and give them each a raw deal by making their one protected crossover the hardest game of the year (whereas, say, Indiana's protected crossover is a pitiful Purdue team in this scenario).

Beyond that, you have teams that have lower ceilings but are perennially solid in Iowa and Wisconsin, a program that could be every bit that good in Minnesota, a team that has the resources to be as good as anyone if they ever bother to care about football in Illinois, and one of the WINNINGEST PROGRAMS OF ALL TIME in Nebraska.

The west will be fine. Maybe it will lose 70% of the title games, but that's going to happen somehow anyway.

The home regionals in 2002, featuring the Molly Game and the Denver game, were off the hook. The electricity in the building of that Denver game (I understand the North Dakota regional in '98 was just as lively, but I wasn't there) was as incredible an atmosphere as any I've ever experienced in any sport.

And I was at UM-OSU in '97, in the Shoe three times including '02, at peak power Tennessee and at LSU at night. I've also attended Wings home playoff games, including in '02. It's right there with the best, better than the NHL. College hockey is capable of incredible atmosphere.

Well, just realigning the divisions isn't going to fully cut it, but let's get started.

Let's move Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, and Indiana into the B1G West. The division will probably be a bit too large, so Nebraska will rejoin Oklahoma in the Big 12. The western division of Michigan, OSU, MSU, Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Northwestern, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa will then be known as the "B1G Ten." Penn State, Rutgers, and Maryland will then recruit BC, Syracuse, Pitt, West Virginia, Notre Dame, and Miami (YTM) and become known as the "B1G East."

Kinda proving the point. That rivalry isn't particularly important anymore either, fading out over the last few years.

Comparing any rivalries to college football is unfair to the other rivalries. No North American sport* does rivalries like college football. The passion of the fans, the size of the fanbases and the crowds, the bands, the absolute year-making nature of each game (yeah, the OSU loss still stings, right now, and has never stopped stining) and the corresponding ability of a team to destroy the hopes of their rival... there's nothing like it.

Baseball, Red Sox-Yankees? Please. NBA? C'mon. College basketball, Duke-UNC? They typically play one of their games on the last weekend of the season when both are basically already locked into their high NCAA tournament seeds. Hockey? Wings-Avs was great... 15 years ago. NFL? There are passionate Vikings and Packers fans saturating my area, and it's really not a big deal at all.

*European soccer and an isolated rivalry or two in South America aren't included in this--hard for anything in America to match that. When a club like Barcelona is the main source of pride for an entire region oppressed by a dictator who supports and thumbs the scales for Real Madrid? When Celtic and Rangers are proxies for occasionally violent religious divisions in the UK? Hard for us to match that.

Who knows what they were thinking. Of course, since they're used to the last name (and it is spelled differently) they may not have thought hard about it.

The author with whom I share a name was already widely known when I was born, but my parents didn't know who he was, and thus I get a name that everyone recognizes for someone else. C'est la vie. Likely an accident for him, though an unfortunate one.

I'm really, genuinely interested to see what Don Brown does with all of the prep we've known him to be working. For all we know all coaches do this whenever an option team is on the schedule and he just has Michigan playing a basic 3-3 vanilla option counter defense. OTOH perhaps the spring gameplanning was extra prep and they come out with something that completely jails Air Force.

I don't know. It will be interesting to see. Just watch your knees on those cutblocks, fellas.

Innovation is not a specialty of the NFL and offenses have a much stronger tendency to look similar to each other. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. It's a high-pressure business and real innovation involves a lot of risk. Risk is something that mid-level programs in college can afford to take. Northwestern was a perfect place to integrate the zone-read option because the cost for failure was the same mediocrity they were accustomed to but the reward for success was a dramatic win against wait I have no memory of any such event.

Oregon rode its system to a decade of unprecedented success that only petered out last year.

2. The intensive nature of NFL preparation produces advantages in matchups that do not require "systems" to create and helps to quickly nullify real innovation when it occurs.

The coaches and players study tons of film. They install an entire game's worth of plays in a week, all designed to deal with the specific matchups and schemes their new opponent will bring to bear. Jim Harbaugh is considered really aggressive in installing a dozen new plays a week and scouting everything about the opponent in college; EVERY COACH does this in the NFL or they get fired.

That means that offenses and defenses find matchups to take advantage of, not by running an unfamiliar system, but by meticulous work during the week.

And it means that teams with a unique scheme (Chip Kelly did this) quickly lose the advantages that scheme brings as intensive film study comprehensively identifies the weakness of the scheme and the ways to attack it. Oregon always tipped plays in college (fishduck's famous videos described this completely years ago when Oregon was killing everybody) but in the NFL the coaches had the material and schemes to use that information to shut down Kelly's run games.

A new innovation can work for a game or two out of surprise, but once someone figures out the counter to it the novelty is over. Remember when the Dolphins tore up the Pats using the wildcat formation with Ronnie Brown? People thought it was the dawn of a new era in the NFL; instead it was solved within a year and basically went away.

And that was a weird choice, because Lee was typically too smart to call that kind of attack from that kind of position. Kind of like Nick Saban bizarrely calling a bad defense in a key series in the playoff or something.

Worth noting that this tweet occurred during an ugly Thursday game. The Thursday games have been aesthetic disasters, both for their awful uniform concepts and the play on the field, which I think legitimately suffers from the short (one crucial day shorter than college) layoff.

I like football and I enjoy watching the NFL but the Thursday night package is basically must-not-watch tv and honestly I don't mind because it clears up my schedule a bit.

I generally stick to watching Red Zone, which has become the best sports television product in existence.

The NFL is more sophisticated, and for those who enjoy the "technical" side of things it's fascinating to pay attention to. Following guys like Chris Brown really help bring that part out.

But the actual games have always been, on the whole, more of a drag to watch. The pace of play isn't as good--there are fewer plays with more commercials.

And while every game does have a lot of significance relative to other sports, the world doesn't weigh on each game the way it does in college. And there are just some dud games where the action isn't good and the relevance isn't there.

Also, the league is so QB-dependent that teams without a solid QB just plain struggle. Every year you know the Pats and Packers will be dangerous, and you know a team like Cleveland is going to stink.

Indeed. Given that Michigan's offensive talent is not yet on that level, we need Speight to be even better, I would think. Or, at least, on par with those guys.

Thing is, I think he can.

Oddly, I'm coming to the conclusion that Speight isn't the "conservative" pick for Harbaugh. He's the ceiling guy. It seems backwards, since O'Korn and Peters appear to have better physical tools, but playing either of those guys requires Harbaugh to field a much more limited offense. Limited reads, limited playbook.

To do everything in the offense that Harbaugh/Drev/Pep want, they need the guy who knows the whole playbook. And that's Speight.

Reaching the ceiling requires making the right reads and executing the throws. He already makes the right reads; he is inconsistent with the throws. But only one guy can make the Harbaughffense hum, and that's Speight, if he can hit those throws consistently.

Game managing is the opposite of fumbling near the goal-line and throwing pick 6s. The whole point of a "game manager" QB paradigm is to field a guy who makes good decisions and avoids mistakes, occasionally making an important play, allowing the team's superiority in other areas to win the game.

A game manager performance in Columbus puts Michigan in the B1G title game. I'm not a Sph8r. I like him and I like what he brings to the table and I believe he'll improve, but what he is right now is a mistake-prone playmaker.

I suppose "the case for Mike McCray" doesn't have the same ring to it, so we get this instead.

I'm basically where reshp1 is on this, but there's an entire sports talk industry built upon basically yelling at the rain, and we're all here posting on this thread, so there you go.

I believe Speight can improve considerably. It's clear that he knows the offense and almost always makes good reads. He has shown the capability of making good throws, sometimes even in difficult windows or conditions.

He just hasn't put it together, and the start to the season actually seems like a step back in some ways (Tacopants was not a regular UFR feature last year). But the material is there.

I hear you there, and I tend to agree--Harbaugh seems to view this as more than a career move. But keep in mind that he DID love coaching in the NFL, his brother is there, and he came as close as you can to winning it all without winning.

Remember, LSU fans thought Nick Saban was loyal to LSU, too. Harbaugh's a different case, because he really does have a love for Michigan (that's the only reason we could get him in the first place, and holy cow just thinking about how unlikely that was and how amazing it is that we have him now gives me the chills again as I type this), but he's also a professional coach. Not every priority for a professional coach is the same as the program's.

This is part of what made that play so incredible. We were absolutely snakebit by ND starting in 1987. Michigan had national title potential (and the corresponding high ranking) in every season from 88-90 and we lost each time, often in soul-crushing fashion. It seemed like we'd never win.

And we were barely up, with Rick Mirer waiting on the other sideline to take the ball down and beat us again. And Mo went for it.

And Grbac THREW.

And there he was.

We've won bigger games and climbed higher mountains since then, but I don't think there was a moment I was more excited watching a football game.

*BTW I feel like we actually underrate Desmond Howard. Maybe it's because Woodson won the Heisman AND the national title so soon after. Maybe it's because we've had other transcendant receivers, which robs Howard of the privilege of being the greatest at his position (this here blog gave the title to AC and it's not like it's a bad choice).

But that WH highlight video of him is absolutely amazing. He was Reggie Bush and Percy Harvin before there was a Reggie Bush or Percy Harvin. And he made the most incredible catches. What a brilliant player.

Cowherd is a radio guy and he's going to say stuff that's out there for attention.

And seeing how much Harbaugh loves coaching here, I no longer think he will leave.

But, c'mon, if there's an NFL move that makes sense, it's this one.

It's not just because Luck is "his guy," though that doesn't hurt. But Luck is a top-flight QB, someone that a franchise can build itself around for 10 years. Guys with the potential to be that good don't just come around everyday, and they tend to be so good that their coaches don't get fired because the teams keep winning (hello MIke McCarthy!).

Add to that Harbaugh's Captain Comeback stint at Indy, and you have an almost ideal situation for Harbaugh to return to.

Honestly, if there's a situation in the NFL to tempt Harbaugh, it's this situation. And I have, on occasion, wondered if part of the reason that the Colts haven't already fired Chuck Pagano after a miserable season last year is because they thought they'd have a better chance at Harbaugh after another year or two.

The only real problem is that the front office appears to be a mess, which has wrecked the roster. But Harbaugh (and some good management) can fix the roster, IF they fix the front office.

I'm not terribly worried, because Harbaugh has demonstrated an incredible passion for where he is now. I don't think he's ever leaving.

I know what you mean. I said as much in the offense UFR--the grades and the close-run nature of the misses--the defensive grade will probably look good. Yet, an opponent with any kind of real talent on it could easily have won this game, and as it was Cincy had the ball on the hands of an open receiver streaking towards the endzone (even after the great Winovich play and the Gary hit) in a moment that could have drawn them within three points in the fourth quarter.

Granted, with a young team there are going to be busts. I knew this coming in. I predicted preseason that Michigan will lose a flukey game they shouldn't on a day like this.

But the sheer volume of busts is a bit troubling. Yeah, it's a backup DT playing contain instead of the QB, and a couple of coverage problems, and a read option pitch that gains 16 yards after a turnover, and... well, we're getting a lot of "ands" here. That's a lot of mistakes.

It's kind of amusing that most of them are turned in by McCray, the lone "returning starter," but it's also troubling because that will likely be a trouble spot all year. Surely Joe Moorhead is licking his lips thinking about ways to get Gosicki or Barkley single-covered on McCray. I can't say I'm looking forward to seeing that.

The good news is that there is both room and time for growth. The bad news is that there are a lot of things to fix.

That Watson deflection where he was a step behind and a step inside got a +2. I know the argument is that not many passes can fit that "window," but it was actually a pretty large window and any pass with a bit more loft is not only caught but gives the receiver a chance for YAC that Watson can do nothing about. He was cleanly beaten, IMO.

Still, the rest of his stuff was good.

Bush, in my opinion, is exposing just how weak Michigan's LBs have been in the last decade. We had good ones in the Carr era, guys like Gold and Harris and Foote. But after Harris the ceiling has been "adequate," an issue somewhat mitigated in recent years by superb D lines.

I thought he'd work out. I didn't expect him to outshine the rest of the team so definitively. I hope he stays healthy, because he could be the difference between another "nice, not great" year and beating PSU on the road, OSU at home, and waltzing into the playoff.

You know, if the offense* can get it together.

*little known fact: in an obscure dialect of Aramaic the word "offense" is properly translated into English as "Wilton Speight."

Playing for a good team means you play with better players, which is more fun and makes you look better. It also allows you to make deep playoff runs, which is a lot more fun.

And, typically, good teams have some fringe benefits attached to them (Free Slovin!) that make joining them more attractive. And you get to join them earlier than you can join a college team (Pat Kane took advantage of this).

Given that he's flipping a commitment right now, I would guess that he doesn't have plans to jump to the OHL this year. But that could change. If Saginaw trades his rights, that's panic time.

Not sure what the angle is here. I mean, I guess it's good to think outside of the box for weeks when nothing is going on, and this is a weekend when nothing is really moving the needle. But NYC? College football is irrelevant there. It's not like the city is going to get all excited that a tv network is actually broadcasting from their own city ("Wow! We might see NEW YORK CITY on TELEVISION! How novel!"). No significant football activities take place there.

It's pointless. I guess this is better than just doing the pregame in studio, and they've done the 1-AA thing at NDSU before, and stuff, but this seems silly.

Go to a D-2 or D-3 school (Northwest Missouri State! Mount Union!) or go to the location of the first football game between Princeton and Rutgers or go to Houston and promote relief efforts.

This was a weird game and I suspect that the defense tomorrow will grade out reasonably well and the grades will thus kinda sorta resemble the blowouts we had against soup cans last year.

But this wasn't a blowout and if Cincy had any kind of real ability at all this could have been a disaster.

Speight was unquestionably one of the issues (as Brian said, flip just a couple of plays and this offense looks a lot different on paper). The OL graded out fine. Our receivers are young, etc.

But the way the offense just ground to a halt in the second quarter was very worrying. At a time when they should have scored a couple of TDs to put the game firmly out of reach, they couldn't do... anything. Yeah, there was a bad call, but it shouldn't have come down to it in the first place.

I'd like to see the team run the ball successfully on plays that aren't RPS plusses. Most of Isaac's big gains have been big RPS wins. Those are nice from time to time but the situations will come where we will need to run the ball without RPS wins.

At least the OL is showing signs that it might be able to do that. But in time?

2. Speight last year had long stretches without these mistakes; he has made good passes and he makes good decisions. It's not at all unreasonable to believe that he's capable of making real improvements this year in the games that matter.

This point came up in a board thread, but while the sample size is small the scrambling issue is perplexing, because I recall Speight being quite good at improvising and throwing on the move last year (though I'd be happy to be corrected by actual stats).

But it makes me wonder if the inexperience of our receivers plays a factor here. Darboh, Chesson, and Butt were all seniors with both experience and chemistry. The young guys are an upgrade in athleticism, but perhaps they aren't as good at moving when Speight scrambles and it's time to improvise. If they aren't getting open, he won't be getting good options.

Weird ones, too. Speight was good scrambling last year. I don't know the source and my memory is vague, but wasn't he really effective when moving around compared to the pocket?

Perhaps there's some usable information here: Michigan has young receivers. Last year the receivers had some athletic limitations, but they were smart and experienced. It's not hard to wonder if last year's crew of Chesson, Darboh, and Butt were good at improvising on scrambles to find space to get open, whereas this much younger group of pass-catchers isn't as good at moving around when things break down and/or hasn't developed the same chemistry with Speight that existed last year.

It speaks well of the recruiting and coaching of this staff that phrases such as "this is a playoff year for Michigan" doesn't simply get laughed out of the building. Michigan has a back four that starts one guy older than a sophomore, a receiving corps that essentially has nobody of such experience, and an OL that lost three starters from a mediocre squad last year. Our QB is a redshirt junior 3* recruit.

When the experienced guy among your receivers is the true sophomore, you're going to have some growing pains. When you lost your best TE to an unexpected transfer and you're cobbling together a team from (talented!) spare parts and position switches, you're going to have some growing pains.

We are two games in. The QB has missed some throws. The OL has biffed some blocks. There have, however, been good throws. And open looks. And holes.

This exceptionally young team has a lot of growing to do. A lot will happen this year. Maybe we can throttle back on the feelingsball subtext criticism of the coaches and the QB, and wait and see what happens when we play quality B1G teams.

Henne had better weapons than Speight. His freshman year he was throwing to Braylon Edwards, the best receiver in the country, and Jason Avant. Our receivers and RBs are going to grow, but right now they're not those guys.

The ball left Speight's hand before it arrived between Crawford's arms, meaning that it was essentially thrown to Crawford. I was ready to jump on Crawford for this when I saw it (I questioned his hands last week after a couple of drops) but that is 100% Speight.

Navarre wasn't just a steady mediocre guy, though. He flashed some potential early, but mostly he was plain bad. 2001 was a miserable slog for most of the year and Navarre was the focus of the problems. Navarre had games where he could barely throw an accurate pass and the offense was hopeless no matter what was tried.

But he grew as a QB, and while he never became great, he became very good. After the Oregon and Iowa disasters in 2003 (which were mostly the fault of special teams, though he wasn't great in either game) he rounded into a very good QB that not only had weapons but the ability to hit them. Stretch run 2003 John Navarre was a legit good QB that dominated a legit good Ohio State team, among other accomplishments.

I think Speight can fix his own consistency issues, which to my mind are less serious. I am hopeful that he has better coaching. And, given time, he'll have tools that are just as good (I am still high on the receivers but I, of course, overestimated the ability of the freshmen to be difference-makers early in the season).

I think I agree here. It's early and there's still much to learn, but all of the areas of the team I had questions about look better than advertised (even the right side of the line, which has struggled but not catastrophically) except Speight.

The upshot is that the defense looks like it has the potential to win the B1G this year. The offense not so much, and a great deal of the issue on offense wears #3.

I actually think Speight is better at the same stage of his career than Navarre was. He has never had the lows Navarre did, and both were a couple of breaks away from winning in Columbus. Speights agility in the pocket and his command of the offense are both significantly better than Navarre's and I think that gives him the potential to get a lot better.

Let's be fair: Calling a game on tv is way different than calling it on the radio.

Some announcer silence in baseball radio works because there are frequent pauses, ambient noise is an important part of the game, and the sounds of the game itself are distinctive enough that they don't necessarily need description (ie the sound of a ball striking a catcher's mitt).

Announcer silence is important in football because the game is very visual and crowd responses are able to supply the audio to support the story the picture is telling. Meanwhile, radio needs details to paint those pictures, especially in football. Frank Beckmann could not be effective using lengthy pauses when something was happening, because we'd be lost.

A good example of the contrast is the Woodson punt return.

Keith Jackson:

He throws in a couple of details, but the crowd and the images say everything and he lets them speak. Terrific call of an all-time moment.

Frank Beckmann:

A great call of the same moment, told completely differently. Details ("splits two men), yard lines, and then when Woodson has broken free he gives a clear indicator that things are going well ("and there he goes!") and then shifts into a triumphant and perfectly paced description that matches the word picture to the significance of the moment.

Note that Beckmann occasionally lagged a bit in his description of a detail compared with the video, as it took a moment for the input to process into his speaking mode. But he included details in just the right quantities and was, typically, quite good at keeping the narrative moving at an understandable rate. After all, someone listening doesn't have a tv to compare it to.

The direction "across the radio dial" is hardly unique to Blaha and helps people with preconceived mental concepts of the field relative to the camera fixtures (or other landmarks if they've been in the stadium) visualize where the action is. A lot of us paint mental pictures of the game.

The rest of the stuff ("two and thirty four") is Blaha schtick, but he has done things that way consistently for decades without pretending to be something he's not. He's not my favorite announcer but neither is he my least favorite and he does a fine job at it.

The main issue with Blaha, as far as I've detected in recent listens, is that he's losing his fastball.

But Tigers play-by-play is a full time job, whereas college football is just a side gig that makes some extra cash. There's a reason Frank Beckmann took the Tigers job back in the day--it was a major career step up.

Can't re-emphasize this point enough. Some people have the gifts to do PbP well. Some don't. It requires a certain voice, a certain cadence of speech, a certain skill in processing and relaying what is seen. Some people have it or develop it well; some people just never will, no matter how talented in other areas (even speaking areas!) or how hard they work. It's no shame on them.

I speak for a living and I'm probably ill-suited for pbp. Brian would probably be bad at it. Many would be. But there's no more shame in saying that than in saying that Ace would be poorly suited to play center for the Pistons. It's just how people are built.

Brandstatter is built to be a host and an analyst. He's not a PbP guy.

By difficult to spend time in during game day, do you mean, clogged with takes of questionable rationality?

Been that way for years. Just something to deal with, really. You can wait until things simmer down after the postgame venting, or you can try to engage some rational-sounding people in a subthread discussion, but there will always be floods of people with takes that are convinced theirs is the truly enlightened one.

I don't know. Perry is clearly a better slot receiver and guys like DPJ and Crawford are just as valid options on jet sweeps. Eddie is fine on those but he doesn't bring much else to the table that isn't already supplied by guys ahead of him.

Kinda wondering if he gets spot duty this season and gets passed by Martin next year.

Don Brown has been prepping for Air Force since Spring. I strongly suspect that the defensive gameplan was kept pretty vanilla this week and wouldn't be at all surprised if they had repped tripe option stuff, or at least introduced some concepts for it. It didn't look like anything was called today that was installed to deal with Cincinnatti.

Alas, Wilton Speight is still Wilton Speight. I'm not the hater many are; he's fine. He has room to become more consistent, and thus improve in non-trivial ways. But he's not a killer the way Mayfield is.

But this OSU team is beatable. Will they get a lot better? Sure they will, they always do. But we have more room to grow than they do this season, and if we are reasonably healthy by Thanksgiving this is a team Michigan can beat.

The Florida=bad caveat should be massive. Especially since we actually did give up two huge scoring plays that Florida got penalized away and simply didn't execute, respectively. That screen wouldn't have lost the game but it looked like a sure td to me and Zaire just blew it.

Of course, teams fail to execute big plays from time to time, and Michigan did in this game. But this is a young defense and there are going to be busts. The long td run is less of a total bust but occurred at a moment that would have been devastating in the game. The screen would have made the score appear closer.

All that said: Stuff went wrong and Michigan otherwise crushed a D-1 team. This doesn't mean that this defense is better than last year's yet, because we haven't really played a genuine offense yet, but it does suggest that it doesn't have massive problems that could be exploited regularly.

And, of course, Devin Bush. Who looks like a 5-star is supposed to look. Who put out the best LB performance I can remember since... David Harris?

We don't even know what great LBs are like anymore. We haven't had them. We've played against them, but they haven't been on our team. Until, it appears, right now.

Jeff Blehar automatically suspects all social media reported hate instances until more evidence comes in regardless of which side it implicates, and that has proven to be wise. A lot of these things turn out to be fabricated, including several instances in Ann Arbor.

And there are a few things that raise an eyebrow here. Still, it is totally plausible that the Sumlins receive vulgar and abusive hate mail, and certainly the university. No doubt worse things are said about Sumlin publicly on social media. This isn't that much harder than a tweet for some people. So I have less reason to doubt this.

Seriously, though, do both. Reorganize your itinerary to be able to catch the whole first half, even if it's just streaming on your phone.

I used to travel to games and I would tailor my schedule to watch Michigan play. Too consumed with Michigan to miss that. You're investing a day in college football, it's worth actually watching football.

I watched Michigan-Iowa (the Marquise Walker catch) from Baton Rouge. Saw Michigan-Illinois earlier that year from Knoxville (was supposed to be a bye, moved due to 9/11). Saw 2003 Michigan-Indiana in Boulder. It can be done and it's a blast.

For that matter I saw 2005 Michigan-OSU from a friend's place before driving to LA to see USC-Fresno State that night. And it was a great time.

As for your question, if I were close enough to a college football facility to attend a game, I'd love to go--I'd pick a game that didn't conflict. We get 12 Michigan games a year, it's simply too scarce to miss.

That superior leverage remained for a long time, too; they did eventually get passed in revenue by the conferences, but that has only occurred in the past ten years. For two decades Notre Dame had the sweetest deal in football, and they squandered it by rolling out Bob Davie, Tyrone Willingham, George Oleary, and Charlie Weis.

A decade is a long time in college football; two decades is an era. While Notre Dame was embracing mediocrity, teams like Nebraska and Miami were forming dynasties with revenue situations that paled in comparison.

It's not that the NBC deal was a blunder; it's that, like the wishbone offense, it was a terrific advantage for a long time that has now been passed by. Notre Dame leaning on NBC today looks like Oklahoma running the wishbone in 1998.

Interesting you mention Hoke, because ND's 2012 title game run is basically a slightly luckier version of Michigan's 2011 Sugar Bowl title. They made it to the title game and were utterly exposed. They had one ok win that season (Oklahoma) and one good win (a flukey one over Stanford) and were otherwise basically untested.

I will grant, though, that I sound overly categorical and that this is a good rebuttal. Yes, Kelly did show that potential at one time, and my posited question is consequently invalid.

But in the time since that lucky title game run ND hasn't come close to putting together a nationally competitive team. In a landscape where it is becoming increasingly clear that you need to recruit and coach excellence, Notre Dame is producing ok-to-bad.

Both basically true, if unenlightening. They thought they had their guy in Weis. Now they've settled, instead, on Brian Kelly. We might be wrong about the sort of person we think Kelly to be (I don't think so, but let's pretend for the sake of argument). But what has Kelly ever done to make ND think that they'll win a national title with him?

It's hard for a team that fancies itself a national power to hire a great coach. There aren't that many around, and the pressure is high enough that mining for gold amongst lower-level coaches doesn't always work. We struck gold because a top coach happens to be our former QB. Most schools do not have that.

I disagree, and I highly doubt the coaches would do this. Ulizio struggled a great deal, but it is also true that a big chunk of his negatives in this chart come from one very specific blocking assignment issue.

And it's his first time in live fire action against a Power 5 DL.

This is exactly the time to play him again. They show him film, he gets a week of practice (including basically 1-on-1 tutoring from Greg Frey, who doesn't need to spend a lot of time on Mason Cole) to apply corrections, and a live game on Saturday to put what he has worked on into practice.

This is exactly the time for Ulizio to play and to make strides in his development.

Yanking him for JBB or Runyan would basically guarantee that RT will be a revolving door disaster for the whole year. None of the players would have any confidence in their opportunity to play or do their jobs, and learning would be stunted by spending time on the bench instead of time on the field fixing the problems. It's a move of desperation, tellingly similar to one perpetrated by Hoke, Funk, and Brandon in 2013 when nobody could block.

Plenty of us made the same point. Right or wrong, the pile-on wasn't prompted by the opinion that Ulizio competing for a position might be an issue. It was entirely in delivery and in persistence, and then continued by the mob focus.

I argued in that very thread that Ulizio emerging was a bad sign, and it wasn't treated poorly.

But we knew RT was going to be bad, right? Michigan just took on a legit Power 5 defense (with a real DL and a history of being quite good!) and was good for 30 points (if you count that stolen TD correctly) and well over 400 yards.

The thing with Ulizio: I'm not optimistic about his ability to remedy his pass protection problems this year. Those sacks he gave up are bad and we should assume that will continue.

But maybe half of his run minuses were the same issue on the strong side where he just blows by a guy on his right shoulder. And later they went for a double-team and that worked fine.

That seems like something that can be remedied over the course of a couple of games, doesn't it? Fix that and work on stunt pickups with Onwenu (they totally biffed that early one) and that's a big chunk of his problems from this game eliminated. Yeah, there will be other questions--he's a redshirt sophomore that appears to have emerged because the other two candidates for the position just aren't good enough--but if a couple of fixes can result in serious improvement, that's a great sign.

He's a true freshman playing on a defense with a deep playbook. Picking this stuff up is a big reason why true frosh don't play that frequently anyway, and with Brown there is a known "acquisition time" with his defense that means first-year guys are going to take time to figure it out.

It's likely not that he knows none of the playbook, but he was thrown to the wolves unexpectedly (just a guess, but I would think that he has been fed small parts of the playbook that he is more likely to use, very base stuff plus some 3rd-and-long packages when extra DBs are handy, and suddenly he's out there running everything Michigan has) in the largest stadium he has ever played in with a live opponent, and he's barely old enough to vote. All of that stuff, combined, can make a kid uncertain.

But yeah, that was encouraging. One thing I will lament is that there wasn't a lot of running success right up the middle. Now, the RBs did pick their holes well, and perhaps that is a sustainable thing, but we won't always be able to gain chunk yardage on 3rd-and-long draws.

There's a fair amount of context provided in this thread concerning the industry headwinds places like Toys R Us face. Obviously, they aren't the only long-time store franchise to be facing trouble--just walk into a K-Mart (if you can find one that's still open) to see that.

But that's the thing. These stores need innovation and differentiation to succeed. Not all brick-and-mortar stores are dying, and even ones that are struggling can find niches to flourish within. They need leadership and innovation and market understanding.

Brandon doesn't have any of these qualities as a CEO; he is an automated business cliche generator. Press a button and he will discuss "brand equity" and "internet revenue growth" and other sophisticated-sounding words recorded at random on hidden microphones concealed in the hallways at Ross, but he can't do anything to actually improve or strengthen what he is in charge of.

Like the 2013 Michigan offense under his personal supervision Brady Hoke and Al Borges, he just keeps trying the same thing that he thinks is supposed to work because he's seen other people do it. And he keeps trying until people get fired.

It's fun seeing him when he was sharper. He played a heel role in the 90s and I used to dislike him for that reason, as he always liked to dig on the negative. As Gameday turned from a cool feature to an institution (I loved having it on the concourse, but back then it was only an hour-long show and not the phenomenon it has become) and Corso aged he turned face and became more grandpa-like.

Note the difference in how he generated heat when he made the '97 pick with the harsh wave and whistles, verses his headgear picks now where he does an overly gentle wave. He's been a different guy for 15 years.

Gameday is way too long now and Fowler was the best host, but Gameday is still awesome. Going live on-site was one of the best sports media moves ever.

The way Mo disappeared from our consciousness is actually kind of shocking. I mean, we knew he was around, and he popped back up with the Lions, and it helped that Carr won it all in '97, but... that was a pretty abrupt firing.

But Bo (who had reacted strongly to Mo being fired before) didn't say anything publicly. The players didn't. Nobody did. We kind of just accepted it and moved on, and this despite Moeller producing some really good teams and recruits.

It wasn't that good. Note the halftime score: 10-0. Michigan won a lot of games like this, throttling the opposition while muddling through on offense. That great Woodson pick in the third quarter against MSU? Michigan led only 13-7 (the 7 coming from that pretty good fake field goal) at the time.

I suspect he'll be fine but unspectacular. A cursory rewatch suggested to me that there were only a few plays he really had a chance to be involved in and he was fine. His destruction of a double-team was a factor in the Winovich sack td play. However, there weren't a lot of wow moments compared to, say, Hurst (+3 on that screen snuff is a dead lock) and Bush.

Appears that way. In that sense, at least, it can demonstrate how conferences are doing as a whole if they have a lot of home territories under their control. Also, once a team loses its home territory it's really hard to get it back, so you'll see oddities like Oklahoma missing Norman but owning half the state of Michigan (CMU plays at Kansas, which...) in the Big 12 title game.

Not necessarily. Since so many teams don't play each other, weird stuff happens. Like, Georgia could lose to Notre Dame this week, and its territory will be out of the SEC for the rest of the year. Tennessee could then beat Florida but then lose to Georgia, but win the SEC East, and show up at the title game with almost no territory for Bama to take.

Minnesota's massive territory could be ceded to the B1G East when they play Maryland in a few weeks, which would likely result in OSU carrying it into the playoff. But if Minnesota loses this weekend in Corvallis, the Pac 12 could get it and it might never make it out of the west.

Interesting idea, but the "closest" premise is flawed and the clearest sign of this is that Minnesota, of all schools, appears to start with the most territory in the lower 48. They need use one of those Facebook-sourced "favorite team" maps instead, for better balance.

It's going to wind up looking weird late when flukey win streaks mean most teams aren't playing for anything but two mid-pack Big 12 teams (or something) are playing for half the country.

Overall a cool concept, though, and if this is posted again I'll click. Reminds me of the college hockey championship belt, a long-running USCHO forum feature that has become (by default) one of the USCHO forum's best assets.

Michigan kinda consumes everything. I've had some sympathetic feelings for LSU and Texas A&M and have attended games there; I suppose in otherwise neutral matchups I pull for them, but with LSU in particular it's hard to root for them at all given how corrupt I believe their program to be.

But honestly my main concern is what's best for Michigan. Since I live in Minnesota I don't mind seeing the Gophers do well against other teams, but I'm pretty detached.

So I guess the only other team I actively care about the results of now is UMD, a local Division 2 power. I'm pretty fair-weather but I dropped in on their game last Thursday (a top-25 matchup with Sioux Falls that turned into a dreary offense-free loss) and care about how they do. And I followed their most recent D-2 championship run pretty closely, braving the brutal windchills to watch an electric playoff win over NW Mo St 5 or 6 years ago.

This is just rumor and stuff people are hearing (according to the link, Lombardi is just saying he's hearing things) right now. So my takeaway is not that McDowell is done; my takeaway is that this is serious enough that such discussion isn't ridiculous.

People certainly are tight-lipped about it, strangely so. Not good. And if it does wind up ending his career, what a terrible tragedy, attitude or otherwise.

300 yards rushing is a huge day against a Bama team that gave up 70 yards a game on the ground and less than 200 total per game in 2011. Tune-up or not, this was a body bag game that Bama struggled with specifically because the option is a hard offense to defend.

Some of this is understandable. The game has changed, and is played faster now. Teams become faster just by inflation.

But this is probably the fastest Michigan team relative to the rest of college football that I have seen (97 maybe? They were also really fast, especially in their era) and certainly faster in absolute terms.

I'm really excited because for my entire life I have wanted Michigan to be that dominant, elite program that not only wins titles but everyone fears. Miami, FSU, mid-90s Nebraska, USC, Alabama. Why not us? Didn't quite get there from 88-92. Didn't sustain it after 97 and 99.

This is a really bad argument. Hoke may do well at Tennessee, or he may do poorly, or things may melt down there and prevent us from truly knowing how good he is.

But to take his first game, taking over an awful run defense, against Georgia Tech of all teams, is absurd.

Georgia Tech is the most sophisticated of all triple option offenses, offenses that succeed in this era in part because other teams have no precedent for preparing for them. Greg Mattison, an NFL DC who also won a national title at Florida, was flummoxed by Air Force in our previous meeting. Nick Saban's Alabama team gave up 300 rushing yards to Georgia Southern (!) running the option in 2011, the year they fielded one of the greatest defenses of all time. Don Brown has been developing his Air Force game plan since before the team went to Rome. It's challenging.

Option offenses require defenses to play unfamiliar assignment football and execute. It is incumbent upon the DC to put those players in the right position to succeed. When the DC does not produce a good gameplan, teams like Georgia Tech carve through them like a scythe.

There is absolutely nothing that can be learned that is useful information about Brady Hoke, good or bad, from this game. If a coach deserves criticism, it is DC Bob Shoop. Regarding Hoke, let the season play out. Maybe he's not that good, maybe he's great, but you can't tell anything from Monday Night.